Mana Imbalances - Drought/Flood
I began playing MtG Arena again within the last month, and since picking it up again I have found that my games have a disproportionate number of mana droughts and floods (mana *****). I recognize that this is a part of Magic and we can expect to see it in about 20% of games, but since I picked up Arena again it's been occurring in roughly half my games.
There are multiple occasions where, usually while playing first and despite one or two mulligans , I only see 2 mana in my starting hand OR 3 mana of one color and spells in a second . Once the game starts, I regularly go 3-5 turns without seeing a land, and in some games I won't see more than 3 mana across 8 turns (including starting hand). For every two games like this, I get a third where 2 out of 3 draws is a land. In between these I usually get 3 games (give or take) where the mana-to-spell ratio is decent-to-good, which means my mana ***** rate sits at around a 50% ratio. This is frustrating enough in unranked Standard and Alchemy, but it's downright maddening in Draft and Ranked since there are actual consequences to losing/conceding.
For clarification, I usually run ~16 mana (2-color) in Draft, ~23 in standard and alchemy formats, and 37 in Brawl. The only format I do not frequently experience mana ***** in is Brawl, in which I run a deck focused on card draw, and even in this format I frequently won't see additional mana for 3-4 turns despite the increased draw power.
To head off the "but WotC says" crowd: I recognize that the algorithm is THEORETICALLY working well, but this does not change the fact that my games experience 2x-3x the expected rate of mana issues despite careful deck balancing. I also recognize that there are workarounds (ramp decks, card draw, etc.), but there is no way to guarantee one of these deck types in draft. Even if you could, a player should not be locked into playing specific deck types in order to deal with something that shouldn't be recurring problem in the first place. As such, I implore WotC to re-evaluate their algorithm to determine why the mana ***** occurrence rate is so inflated for some players.